The Department of Africana Studies’ Rites and Reason Theatre will perform Jenna Spencer’s play June’s Blood at the historic National Black Theatre in Harlem, New York, on June 27-30, 2013. This event marks the first official collaboration between the department and the National Black Theatre, which entered into a formal collaborative intellectual and artistic relationship in the spring of 2012. The play by Spencer, a rising senior Africana studies concentrator, explores the history and memory of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment through the story of three generations of women in one family. Elmo Terry-Morgan, associate professor of Africana studies and artistic director of Rites and Reason, is director of this workshop production. Spencer developed the play in Terry-Morgan’s “Research to Performance” playwriting class. Two special events will take place during the play’s run. On Friday, June 29, the theater will host a Brown Inman Page Alumni Council Night. (Page, an 1877 Brown graduate, was one of the University’s first known African American alumni.) On Saturday, June 30, Lundy Braun, professor of Africana studies and pathology and laboratory medicine, will hold a post-production conversation about the play with audience members.Read more